Posts from January 2009

This is the third post arising from a feature article on OD published in HRZone.co.uk. It addresses another of the questions asked by features editor Annie Hayes during her research for the article.

So, is now the right time for managers to be investing in the future, by initiating change and organization development strategies? Or, given the current recession, should they be focusing their attention on more immediate concerns?

This was the second question asked by Annie Hayes, as the basis for her feature article on OD published in HRZone.co.uk.

The core of my response was that I believe that the primary focus of OD/change strategies - at all times - should be on enhancing business performance.

I'm using the term "business performance" here to refer to all forms of profit-based and not-for-profit organisations. The ‘business’ of all organizations is to deliver specific benefits to specific beneficiaries, whether operating as a commercial enterprise, public sector organization, charity or whatever.

Therefore, the first question that any OD/change strategy needs to address is "What is the business agenda?"

In a previous post, I commented on Stephen Billing’s interesting and informative series of posts on the work of Patricia Benner. In them, he draws insights for the leadership of organizational change from Benner’s work on patient care. This explores the practice of professionals in dealing with people’s experience of health and illness, growth and loss. And, as Billing points out, people going through change similarly experience growth and loss.

In my commentary, I suggested that I could see parallels between the dynamics of change as set out in Informal Coalitions and Benner’s four "aspects of humanness" (embodied intelligence, background meaning, concerns, and situation) that informed Billing’s posts. And I want to explore those further here.

In another interesting series of posts in his Changing Organisations blog, Stephen Billing introduces the work of Prof. Patricia Benner and draws implications from it for leaders of organizational change. I haven’t previously come across Benner’s theories. So Billing’s summary of her work and his accompanying commentaries are very welcome and thought-provoking.

Benner is concerned with the practice of professionals dealing with health and illness, growth and loss, as these are experienced by individuals in a clinical setting. She proposes that there are four aspects of people’s humanness that enable them to grasp situations directly in terms of their meaning for the self. These are embodied intelligence; background meaning; concern; and situation.

Billing sees the principles that Benner articulates in relation to these as providing an alternative and more useful way of looking at the impact of change on people than that embodied in the characteristic grief cycle, as identified by ElisabethKübler-Ross.

In his latest blog post, You Don’t Need A Vision, Stephen Billing questions the popular belief that crafting an organizational vision is an essential leadership task. Indeed, he goes further by suggesting that "a clearly articulated vision … can actually get in the way of the change you want to achieve".

I take a similarly sceptical view of the value of organizations spending time and effort on creating what in Informal Coalitions I have called an end-state vision. That is, a Vision with a capital ‘V’.

The felt need to create a Vision Statement (and, often, an accompanying set of Values) has become the clichéd response whenever a formal change programme is put together. Even if it were possible to express a Vision in terms that remained meaningful and compelling into the longer term, the challenge of turning this into operational reality would still remain. Too often such Visions and Values are greeted with scepticism or cynicism, as the idealised statements come 'face-to-face' with the tangible reality of people’s everyday experience of organizational life.